her side. The absence of real coarseness in
the midst of so much seeming license, and the perfect social equality
gave her a gratifying impression of her Florentines.

In April it was summer weather; the drives of former days in the Cascine
and to Bellosguardo, where a warm-hearted friend, Miss Isa Blagden,
occupied a villa, were resumed. An American authoress of wider fame
since her book of 1852 than even the authoress of _Aurora Leigh_, Mrs
Beecher Stowe, was in Florence, and somewhat to their surprise she
charmed both Browning and his wife by her simplicity and earnestness,
her gentle voice and refinement of manner--"never," says Mrs Browning,
"did lioness roar more softly." All pointed to renewed happiness; but
before April was over pain of a kind that had a peculiar sting left Mrs
Browning for a time incapable of any other feeling. Her father was dead,
and no word of affection had been uttered at the last; if there was
water in the rock it never welled forth. The kindly meant effort of a
relative to reopen friendly communications between Mr Barrett and his
daughters, not many months previously, had for its only result the
declaration that they had disgraced the family.[71] At first Mrs
Browning was crushed and could shed no tear; she remained for many days
in a state of miserable prostration; it was two months before she could
write a letter to anyone outside the circle of her nearest kinsfolk.

Once more the July heat in Florence--"a composition of Gehenna and
Paradise"--drove the Brownings to the Baths of Lucca. Miss Blagden
followed them, and also young Lytton came, ailing, it was thought, from
exposure to the sun. His indisposition soon grew serious and declared
itself as a gastric fever. For eight nights Isa Blagden sat by his
bedside as nurse; for eight other nights Browning took her place. His
own health remained vigorous. Each morning he bathed in a rapid mountain
stream; each evening and morning he rode a mountain pony; and in due
time he had the happiness of seeing the patient, although still weak and
hollow cheeked, convalescent and beginning to think of "poems and apple
puddings," as Mrs Browning declares, "in a manner other than celestial."
It had been a summer, she said in September, full of blots, vexations,
anxieties. Three days after these words were written a new and grave
anxiety troubled her and her husband, for their son, who had been
looking like a rose--"like a rose possessed by a fairy" is